12 Nov 2011

The company this week announced it is abandoning its work on a mobile version of the Flash Player and will now concentrate its mobile s...01.11

The company this week announced it is abandoning its work on a mobile version of the Flash Player and will now concentrate its mobile software development efforts on HTML5. The move breaks with what had been Adobe's defiant embrace of its venerable Flash technology, a symbol of its strength on desktop PCs, in the face of the surging adoption of a wide variety of powerful mobile devices, from the iPad to countless smartphones.
But the cancellation wasn't a complete surprise. Flash has plenty of opponents, and the biggest one, Apple, also happens to the single most powerful player in mobile computing. By banning Flash on the browser responsible for 62 percent of mobile Web usage, the late Steve Jobs effectively exercised third-party veto power over Adobe's ambitions.
Flash criticisms are myriad. Practical criticisms focus on its direct drawbacks--overworked processors, squandered battery power, and security risks that sometimes went unpatched for too long. Another camp saw Flash--proprietary technology controlled by Adobe--as anathema to the Web standards that at least theoretically stand to benefit a much larger group.